Monday, 31 October 2011 22:46
DEVELOPMENT DEFICIT
BY SUDARSHAN CHHOTORAY
The issue of Bangladeshi refugees again cropped up recently following the murder of Umerkote MLA Jagabandhu Majhi on September 24 near a village in Umerkote in Nawarangpur district.
Though various theories have surfaced on the murder mystery but one relating to the long standing disputes between tribal leadership and refugees is increasingly getting acceptance. Similarly, the arrest of some Bangladeshis of the Kendrapada seacoast has further fuelled suspicion about the activities of the illegal settlers.
Rani Haldar belongs to Goda village of Odisha’s Jagatasinghpur district, which was the worst hit by the killer Super Cyclone in October 1999. She lost her husband, children and home. She is yet to recover from the trauma. She claims her forefathers have been staying in the village since 1943. They are not infiltrators. They belong to the area.
Rani Haldar and other such refugees have created a furor in the last few years because of their links with the refugee problem in the State. While no official figure is available, it is estimated that more than 7,00,000 refugees are living in various parts of Odisha. A majority of them are Bengali refugees, the rest are from Tibet, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka.
The Bengali refugees have their own story to tell. After the formation of East Pakistan in 1948, thousands of Bengalis had left their homes to settle in India. After the formation of Bangladesh in 1971, more Bengalis (both Hindu and Muslim) sought refuge in India. Some of them were rehabilitated in Dandakaranya forest range of South Odisha by the Government of India in collaboration with the State Government.
Apart from this, a large-scale influx of Bengali refugees, who have subsequently settled in coastal areas of the State, has raised many eyebrows. Besides engaging in marine and inland fishing and allied trades, they have illegally occupied coastal forestland and are responsible for the destruction of the coastal eco-system, complain some local residents of Jagatasinghpur district.
The illegal radio stations and the arrest of a few suspects in the Rajnagar block of Kendrapara district in May 2002 have brought to light the activities of infiltrators from Bangladesh and security breaches made in the vicinity of sensitive defence installations. It is suspected that ISI and other foreign intelligence networks have installed some transmission centres near the Wheeler Island in the Bay of Bengal to get information regarding Chandipur missile testing range.
The State Home Department in Odisha has identified for deportation of 2,867 Bangladeshis in six districts such as Kendrapara, Malkangiri, Bhadrak, Nowrangpur, Jagatasinghpur and Sambalpur. As many as 392 have been issued “quit India” notices; 21 from Nowrangpur district were recently handed over to the Border Security Forces (BSF) in neighbouring West Bengal for deportation. The rest will be deported in a phased manner as the process of identification is still underway with several districts yet to submit their final lists. Official sources said in the past too, the State Government has taken steps to deport illegal immigrants. About 102 Bangladeshi infiltrators were deported from 1973 to 1993.
Of late, a tug of war over immigrants between the ruling BJD and opposition parties has become sharper. Few nationalist and Hindu organisations have alleged that the identification for deportation is being made on communal lines, because Hindu refugees have not voted in favour of the ruling party. Dismissing this charge, a senior State Government official said that all has been done as per a Central Government circular issued on September 16, 1997.
According to Biman Biswas, a refugee settled in Odisha, the State Government has neglected the refugees. Refugees from Bangladesh who are now living in Malkangiri, Raighar and Umerkote areas should not be treated as infiltrators as they all came to India before December 1971. They have been here for the last 40 years and should be able to avail of all facilities and services, he said.
Biswas further clarified following the announcement of the Government of India through All India Radio, most Hindu refugees came here from East Pakistan after the partition and were rehabilitated in Malkangiri, Raighar, Umerkote, Kendrapara and Puri districts. In those days, the Government had provided land, agriculture equipment and citizenship certificates in the names of the heads of their families.
Now their families have expanded and they are facing a problem of citizenship, because teenagers were not issued with this certificate at that time. They have now been short-listed for deportations, he rued.
Interestingly, local politics has also taken an ugly shape — those who were fighting against refugee ouster have now politically settled into various parties. As a result, the conflict owing to the refugee issue is gaining momentum, and both refugees and the tribals are victims of their ugly game.
Right to citizenship
Those who argue in favour of the refugees’ right of citizenship say that Bengali refugees had come here after partition and during the formation of East Pakistan/Bangladesh. A generation has been created here. Those who were teenagers or young at that time have now grown old; they have lost their property and relatives in Bangladesh. Today they face an identity crisis. Neither the Bangladeshi Government nor the Indian Government accepts them.
“Refugees should not be dealt with like outsiders; they should be treated like human beings,” said Mohammad Amin, a human rights activist. “Wherever they go, they adopt the norms of the local society, its culture and lifestyle. In fact, the problems with refugees are not of the local people, it is the politicians who are making a hue and cry about the issue,” argues Amin.
K Sudhakar Patnaik, social scientist, calls upon NGOs and the Government to work for reducing the disparity between refugees and local people. There is a need to do both, educate the tribal population and orient the refugees to respect local practices and traditions, he opined.
He added that the settling of non-tribal refugees in the tribal belt is bound to create serious socio-economic and cultural problem and hence conflict is inevitable.
The story so far
Those who had left the erstwhile East Pakistan for India after its partition came all the way across the border in search of safe shelter and to earn their livelihood. The Government of India, in view of the magnitude of the problem, identified the Dandakaranya forest range bordering Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh of the Eastern Ghat to rehabilitate them. An estimated 7,500 refugees were put up in Malkangiri and Umerkote subdivision of Koraput district.
The Government distributed at least 92,252 acre of land among them. About 55,690 acres were given to the refugees settled in Umerkote alone. In the first phase, each family got at least seven acres of land for housing and kitchen gardens. Those who arrived later were given five acres each of non-irrigated land or three acres each of irrigated land. To curb growing resentment over such facilities being given to outsiders, the Government declared that it would provide at least five acres of land to the local landless people. Their promise never materialised and, as a result, conflict and hatred between the local people and the refugee population grew. An observer said, the Government could have resettled these refugees in West Bengal or coastal Odisha. But these politically sensitive areas denied outsiders.
The local people were tribals and Dalits who were supporters of the Congress. The Congress, the ruling party at that time both at the Centre and the State, backtracked on their promise of land to the local people. Subsequently, the Government which had set up Dandakaranya Development Authority (DDA), to plan safe livelihood, came into trouble in the same area because thousands of acres of forestland had been destroyed in the name of development. Large-scale encroachment of Government land and siphoning off land from the tribal and Dalits has become the order of the day. The Government has allegedly used more than 227,000 acres of forestland to rehabilitate 7,500 refugees. Besides, the refugees were given fishing ponds, a maize cultivation project and a seed depot. Bhaskal Dam was set up to irrigate their land. Above all, they were enlisted in the Scheduled Caste category and even attained political sanction to contest elections.
(The writer is a senior freelance journalist)
PUBLISHED ON 1ST NOVEMBER 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment